No.10 Fellow notes – capability, capability, capability

Thinking at national scale is quite something.

I find myself in a world where the decimal points are often in the billions.

Infrastructure and national programmes are incredibly costly. But when it comes to digital change, funding may be less important that the other challenge I keep hearing about: capability.

‘Capability’ is one of those government words that everyone uses – what it means is people. People with the skills and experience to lead and deliver digital work.

“You’d be surprised how hard it is to recruit for really interesting jobs.”

Recruiting for digital talent is hard, and getting harder.

Because the other thing you see at national scale is – we are so early in this digital journey.

We all throw around examples from Facebook, Amazon and Netflix as if digital transformation is a solved problem. We just need to go agile and catch up with Silicon Valley – right?

But it is much more complex than that. In many ways, Silicon Valley has been doing the easy bits. Social networks, streaming video and ecommerce are the low hanging fruit of the internet.

Now the really hard work starts. We need these skills solving hard problems in every sector. Every company. Every charity. Every local and national public service. Everywhere.

The UK government’s list of shortage occupations (eligible for a skilled worker visa) already includes business analysts, architects, systems designers, programmers, software developers, web designers and communications professionals.

The civil service has around 600 digital/data/tech vacancies. Facebook has 300 open positions in the UK. Apple has 200. Google has 150.

Amazon has around 1,000 open digital roles! Including 270 software developers, 170 solutions architects, and 300 product or project managers.

And… we’re still so early.

This gets you thinking about training and education.

You often hear people in these roles joking about the roundabout nature of their career. I’m the same. I probably shouldn’t have done English Literature at university, although I enjoyed every minute of it.

It’s incredibly hard for teachers and the computing curriculum to keep up with the technology. We seem to accept that these skills will often be developed at home or on the job.

About 14% of 16-year-olds took the computing GCSE this year.

But if digital capability is a blocker – what’s the solution at national scale?